Skills network incubator for speakers of rare languages
Asian University for Women recruits students from a range of disenfranchised or marginalised groups. I’m not—just now—going to dig into the slipperiness of how a World Bank funded institution might choose to define such groups, but one effect of this recruitment policy is that many of our students speak rare, endangered, or suppressed languages. When I began to highlight the value of these languages in the classroom, there was a huge response from the students. AUW is therefore developing a pilot project as part of our contribution to UNESCO’s International Year of Indigenous Languages (@iyil2019) designed to build skill-sharing networks among activists working for Indigenous, rare, or marginalised languages.
The range of smaller or marginalised languages here is impressive. So far we’ve had presentations on Bumthangka, Burushaski, Chaitgaĩyya, Khowar, Hazaragi, and Shina. I’ve used plenty of examples from Newari in our discussions, and I know there are a number of other languages spoken here that have not yet been presented. A number of interesting points have emerged.
Most of the students who speak a small or marginalised language can point to well-known figures from their own communities who are already involved in language documentation: compiling dictionaries, writing grammars and so on. Sometimes this is in co-operation with outside scholars. However there are several stories of deliberate local autonomy in language documentation, specifically in reaction to the linguistic projects of missionaries or others who are perceived as colonial agents of one kind or another. For many of these communities, the effort has moved on to a second stage of collecting and compiling corpora of stories, songs and so forth. Here, we are developing tools for a third stage of studying how flourishing local languages connect to, for example, resource management (Ostrom) or biodiversity (Maffi and Terralingua) while nonetheless keeping a watchful eye on the politics of global commodification and capture (Brosius, Agrawal) and a fourth stage in which the students build the tools they need to collaborate across communities and national boundaries to ensure that their languages continue to flourish.
There are also many reports of good programmes around language revitalisation being shut down by national authorities who see local languages as a threat to national integrity. There seems to be a global retreat from efforts to implement education in local languages that corresponds to the rise of insecure, authoritarian regimes. Language documentation and revitalisation for many indigenous communities becomes a point of struggle between missionaries, anthropologists or other outsiders trying to convert, subvert, or commodiify the local culture in one way, and nationalist homogenisers trying to erase it in another.
Our goal, then, is to build skills and lateral skill-sharing and advocacy networks among speakers of these languages while they are finishing their undergraduate degrees. Almost all of our students are the first in their families to enter higher education, but we know from graduate outcome studies that AUW students are very likely to complete a postgraduate degree as well as to find employment either with international NGOs or as civil servants. They are thus ideally placed to develop a network across many watersheds, nations and ecosystems that will mature as they each become stronger advocates and agents for change.
Two other points emerge from all this, both to do with the politics of language. First: we can’t easily say what counts as an indigenous language (I am deliberately using the lower-case ‘i’). Scottish Gaelic, for example, is certainly not the language of an Indigenous people, though it has been marginalised through the politics of Scottish history. So, too, Chaitgaĩyya is a language proper to a place, with a long history and a distinctive culture that is deliberately suppressed as a language for teaching and literature by the national government of Bangladesh, but it is not the language of an oppressed Indigenous community in the way that its very close relative Chakma certainly is. Both of those will no doubt be controversial claims for some folk; my real point is that declaring an International Year of Indigenous Languages pushes us towards a classificatory quagmire. Here at AUW we will be supporting the Burushashki speakers and the Chaitgaĩyya speakers equally: in the face of nationalist language homogenisation projects and social networking technologies that favour easy-to-represent languages as vehicles for commodification and viral marketing, we all need all the friends we can get. This is the same approach taken by the ICCA consortium: an inclusive network with strong ethical ambitions, not an exclusive club.
Second: My colleague Gerald Roche (@GJosephRoche) is fond of pointing out how classifying a living language as a ‘dialect’ (as so often happens with Scots) is a specific act of political oppression that nation-states use quite a bit these days. Our conversation in class around the status of Chaitgaĩyya and Hazaragi reflected these tensions. The Hazaragi speakers in particular were quite clear that they recognised the debate and wanted very much for Hazaragi language and culture to flourish, but they did not want to fight for Hazaragi to be recognised as a distinct language. Again, as with the awkward deployment of the term ‘indigenous’ above: it’s better not to get involved in a definitional struggle when the practical work is sitting right in front of us.